Interested adventurers should search within Obulus Frontier for clues on how to begin this new quest. Good hunting!

FAMILIARS

Experts in the mysterious menagerie have discovered a subspecies of creatures that have been found to increase the master’s ability to channel greater power.

You can access the Familiar window via a tab in your character UI.

PROVING GROUNDS

This update includes two new cooperative competition zones (Battle upon the High Seas and Battle for Felwithe) that allow groups of up to six to compete against each other in timed races to see who can complete the zones’ challenges first.

Only one zone is available at a time, and the fastest times for each round, currently set for seven days, will be recorded on a leader board accessible from within the Proving Grounds.

To keep things competitive, stats granted from gear are not added to the character in the Proving Grounds.

All heals and wards are percentage based while in the Proving Grounds, scaling off of spell tier and level.

First of all, I’d like to thank EQ2Wire for giving me the opportunity to rant about…I mean discuss the current situation regarding DPS in EQ2.

What I’m going to do here is give 3 rankings and 1 “score” for all DPS classes. Firstly, I will rank where they were. Next I will rank where I expect them to end up after the dust of GU103 settles. Lastly among the rankings, I will include a “value” rank that indicates my opinion of the overall. Finally, the “score” for the DPS classes will be in relation to each other, with the top ranked class being 100, and the rest of the classes being numerically related to my expectation of what % of the damage output they will be compared to the #1 ranked class.

A large portion of Game Update 103: The Managerie is now available for Testing on the Test server. Please note that it is
not possible to COPY characters to the Test server. This will present an obvious roadblock to most for testing level 100 content unless you happen to have one of the
189
level 100 characters which has been active on Test in the last four months.

Here are some highlights from the
Test Update Notes for May 2, 2017
from the EQ2 Forums:

NEW KUNARK ASCENDING HERITAGE QUEST

Interested adventurers should search within Obulus Frontier for clues on how to begin this new quest. Good hunting!

FAMILIARS

Experts in the mysterious menagerie have discovered a subspecies of creatures that have been found to increase the master’s ability to channel greater power.

You can access the Familiar window via a tab in your character UI.

PROVING GROUNDS

This update includes two new cooperative competition zones (Battle upon the High Seas and Battle for Felwithe) that allow groups of up to six to compete against each other in timed races to see who can complete the zones’ challenges first.

The fastest times for each round, currently set for seven days, will be recorded on a leader board.

Removed the Membership requirement from the following zones:

City of the Nayad [Advanced Solo]

City of the Nayad [Heroic], Scourge Keep [Advanced Solo]

Scourge Keep [Heroic], The Fabled Antechamber of Fate [Raid]

The Fabled Cavern of the Crustaceans [Raid]

The Fabled Chamber of Immortality

The Fabled Nizara

The Fabled Nizara

The Fabled Ruins of Varsoon

The Fabled Sanctum of Fear

The Fabled Temple of Cazic-Thule

The Fabled Xux’laio’s Roost [Raid]

Zek, the Scourge Wastes [Heroic]

Zek, the Scourge Wastes [Solo]

Zek, the Scourge Wastes: The Siege [Raid]

There are quite a few more test notes which can be found on the
EQ2 Forums.

All hail the Overlord – the Freeport City Festival returns to the Commonlands from May 1-7! Spend
City Tokens
on local specialties, generic festival goods, appearance clothing, or food & drink. Make sure all your characters have finished the Freeport Postage Collection, speak to Kella Swampfoot to assist with festival quests, and achieve 119 seconds or less in the local
Aether Race
to earn the Portal Jumper title.

We’re grateful for your patience as we worked through some technical issues with our servers. While our fixes seem stable so far, we want to take more time to test and verify our changes before launching GU103: The Menagerie. Since we want to ensure that the launch of our next game update is as smooth and stable as possible,
we’ve decided to move the launch of GU103: The Menagerie to Tuesday, May 9, 2017.

To thank you for your patience and support, we’ll be activating
Triple XP (AA, Adventure, Tradeskill) for ALL players and ALL servers starting now. This will run until Sunday, April 30, 2017 at 11:59PM PDT (07:00 UTC).

In addition, we’ll be activating
Double Ascension Scrolls starting on Monday, May 1, 2017 at 12:01AM PDT (7:00 UTC). This will run through Sunday, May 7, 2017 at 11:59PM PDT (07:00 UTC).

–

We’ve updated the dates of GU103: The Menagerie, our next stream, our AMAs, and the level 100 character boost promotion.

We’re grateful for your patience as we worked through some technical issues with our servers. While our fixes seem stable so far, we want to take more time to test and verify our changes before launching GU103: The Menagerie. Since we want to ensure that the launch of our next game update is as smooth and stable as possible, we’ve decided to move the launch of GU103: The Menagerie to Tuesday, May 9, 2017.

To thank you for your patience and support, we’ll be activating Triple XP (AA, Adventure, Tradeskill) for ALL players and ALL servers starting now. This will run until Sunday, April 30, 2017 at 11:59PM PDT (07:00 UTC).

In addition, we’ll be activating Double Ascension Scrolls starting on Monday, May 1, 2017 at 12:01AM PDT (7:00 UTC). This will run through Sunday, May 7, 2017 at 11:59PM PDT (07:00 UTC).

Yesterday we experienced unforeseen technical issues related to an upgrade to one of our internal services. Those complex changes caused issues with logins and required that we take down our servers. We pushed a fix last night and are monitoring the servers closely to verify the fix and ensure its stability.

If you experience unexpected behavior with logins today, please post in this thread.

As we monitor the results of this fix, we may determine it needs time to “bake” further before we make any significant updates. This might impact the release timing of GU103. We will post separately if the GU release date needs to be pushed out to ensure we have healthy, happy servers.

We’d like to apologize for the extended downtime yesterday and thank all of you for bearing with us and for continuing to be a part of our community.

It looks like this morning’s update note of “Updated underlying structure for handling Daily Objectives and Loyalty Tokens. There shouldn’t be any noticeable difference in functionality.” did in fact have a noticeable difference and EQ2 servers are now down for an extended window which could run quite long.

It looks like today’s unexpected downtime has now been extended to Midnight tonight. With servers down at 7:00am, up at 10:00am, and then down again at 10:26am, this will be a total of 16 1/2 hours.

The backbone of any MMO is defined by character progression. That character is you, and that character reflects your hard work. Like any MMO that has been around as long as EQ2 has, you need to be creative, and come up with more ways to improve and increase potential with your character. Whether that means all or some of: new gear, new levels, alternative “systems” to increase power (AA’s), abilities, and then of course new areas to explore and quests to complete. These things keep people engaged, something to work on with their character, and most importantly, playing the game.

EQ2′s latest expansion Kunark Ascending is no different. Developer’s took a very creative and unique approach in the latest expansion instead of simply increasing the [Adventure] level cap (which was the de-facto standard set from EQ1 as well as previous EQ2 expansions); they introduced a “secondary” class, Ascension classes. These classes can be trained and used by any existing EQ2 class, and the ability to switch between all 4 if you’d like. These classes work and are synergistic with each other, as well as your existing class (such as a Bard & Geomancer).

The EQ2 developers will be staging Dev Chats in-game in the Public chat channel on each EQ2 server over the next three days. There have been predictions of chaos and troublemakers interrupting the chat, so this could be very interesting or it could go smoothly and lead to enlightenment.

Updated with Maj’Dul and Isle of Refuge chats having moved to May 1st.

From 12:01AM PST (Midnight)/7:00 UTC on Friday, April 21st, 2017 through 11:59PM PST (Midnight)/7:00 UTC on Thursday, April 27th, 2017, all servers will have bonus experience for All Access Members! This will be applied to Adventure, Tradeskill, and AA.

It is our understanding that this does not double Quest or Ascension XP.

The team has been busier than a pack of Brownies in a bag of catnip! There’s plenty coming up this year, so let’s get right to it, shall we?!

First, on Tuesday, May 2nd we are launching the first of our Level 100 Co-opetition Challenges in the Proving Grounds! What the heck is “co-opetition”? Well…Cooperative Competition, of course!

In teams, you can compete side-by-side with other groups – and even sabotage their progress – as you mow through baddies so you can win! Why win? For new loot and bragging rights! We will start with one Co-opetition Challenge and switch it out with a new match type or layout periodically. Woot!

The monthly Moonlight Enchantments
event begins tonight! The grottos open up on the 20th at 12:01am PT and close on the 21st at 11:59pm PT. The time applies directly with no conversion for all servers.

Players noticed this event had gone live this morning. Here’s the news from the
EverQuest2.com:

Hail Norrathians,

Are you working to level up your Ascension classes? If so, you’re in luck because you’ll get TWO Ascension Scrolls every time you visit your Ascension trainer until Thursday, April 20, 2017 at 11:59PM PDT.

Every year when the time is just right, Tunare whispers to the world that Spring is here. Magic overflows and the flora and fauna rejoice in this season of birth and renewal. Across Norrath, flowers bloom and animals frolic in exuberant celebration.

Inspired by all the spring excitement Beast’r Eggs have started to hatch and explore the world around them. Some of you may already have spied them hiding around Norrath, and if you’re lucky enough to find one, go interact with it and the egg will become your newest cosmetic pet!

There are 5 different Beast’r Eggs (Frisky, Cheeky, Lovely, Cheery, and Bumbly) and each one has its own unique coloring!

You’ll only be able to find these Beast’r Eggs until midnight on Wednesday, April 19th, 2017, but If you aren’t able to find one or fill out your collection, never fear! From Thursday the 20th until 11:59 PM PT April 30th, they’ll find their way on to the Marketplace.

This event went live yesterday but is just now having news posted about it: